Last winter in the United States

by F. Barham Zincke

In these latitudes the forest becomes a little diversified by the appearance of several evergreens. One of the commonest is the evergreen or live-oak. I frequently saw from the cars a small tree having very much the appearance of our bay. There is an occasional magnolia. There are several evergreen shrubs, and some creepers. In swampy places there are long reaches of cane-brake. This is the Bambusa gracilis, which we sometimes see in this country in gardens, in spots where moisture and shelter can be combined. These cane- or bamboo-brakes are evergreen impervious jungles about twenty feet high. But the most interesting form to Northern eyes is that of the little palmetto palm. Its fan-like leaf, however, is all that can be seen of it, for its trunk scarcely rises above the ground. In some of the swamps around New Orleans it and a kind of iris are the most conspicuous plants.

The question of the colonisation or resettlement of the South by the North is simply one of £. s. d. Will it be more profitable for a Northern man to grow cotton in the South, or wheat, pork, beef, &c. in the West? People say Northern emigrants will never go to the poor lands of the South till all the good land of the West is taken up. This is quite a wrong way of putting the case between the two. A man would not go to the South to grow wheat, beef, and pork. That can be done cheaper in the fertile West. But it is not impossible that an equal amount of capital and labour embarked in the cotton culture of the South might produce a greater return. In that case the poor soils of the South might be preferred to the rich soils of the West.

One infers how much more completely the fabric of society rested on slavery in South Carolina than it did in Virginia, by the fact that three fourths of the devastation caused by the great fire at Richmond have been already repaired, while nothing had been done to repair the damages done by the great fire at Charleston, which destroyed the whole of the centre of the city. Literally not one single brick has yet been laid upon another for this purpose. There stand the blackened remains of churches, residences, and stores, just as if it were a city of the dead.

A Charleston Sam Weller.

Still, even here I was surprised at the number and magnitude of the hotels. I had taken up my quarters at the Mills House, where I suppose there were three hundred guests. I saw another, the Pavilion, quite as large; and I was told of a third, the Charleston Hotel, which was described to me as being much larger than either of the two just mentioned.

Before I reached Charleston there had been some wet weather, and the streets were muddy. I therefore used two pair of boots the first day I was in the place. The next morning the Sam Weller of the hotel refused to clean, or as he called it, to shine, more than one pair. I remonstrated with him, but it was to no purpose, as he was quite persuaded of the force of his own argument, ‘that if everyone in the house was to wear two pair of boots a-day his work would be doubled.’ Boots was a Paddy, and, since his naturalisation in the land of freedom, had become sure that he had as much right to form opinions for himself, express them, and act upon them, as the President himself. I carried my grievance to the manager. He promised redress, but the boots were not cleaned, that is to say, not in the hotel. I mention this as it was the only instance of insubordination I met with in this class in my tour through the United States.

Nature has done much for Charleston. Its fine harbour is formed by the junction of two large navigable rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper. It is free from yellow fever, the scourge of Mobile and New Orleans. The orange and oleander grow in the spaces between its streets and its houses. Hitherto it has been the chief winter resort of those in the Northern States who were unable to bear the severity of their own climate, and of those from the West Indies who were unable to bear the heat of theirs. Thus the victims both of heat and of cold met in Charleston, and each found in its delightfully tempered atmosphere exactly what he sought. And the society of these visitors, combined with that of the rich proprietors of the State who had their residences here, made it a very gay and pleasant place. Of course America, hard-worked and consumption-scourged above all other nations, ought to have its Naples; and it will be equally a matter of course that the Naples of America should temper gaiety with trade, and combine work with idleness, and should not be entirely a population of do-nothings, of Lazaroni, and of pleasure-seekers. Still, the feeling that came over one at Charleston was, How far off this place is from the world! It was not the distance that caused this feeling, for it is only nine hundred miles from New York, while Chicago, where one has no feelings of this kind, is three hundred miles further off. Perhaps fifty years hence, when probably a busy white population will be cultivating the land around it, there will be nothing in the place to suggest the thought that, when there, one is out of the world.

Few English Travellers.

I was surprised at finding how few Englishmen had, at all events of late, been travelling in the Southern States. At Charleston, in a dozen folio pages of names in the guest-book of the hotel, which I looked at for this purpose, I could only see one entry from England. At Richmond I only found two English names in forty folio pages, and the address appended to these two names was Manchester. In the North I heard that Lord Morley, and Lord Camperdown, and Mr. Cowper—I do not know whether the Right Hon. W. Cowper was meant—had lately been through that part of the country inspecting the common schools. But during my tour through the United States, I did not fall in with a single English traveller, nor did I fall in with one either on my outward or homeward voyage. All my fellow-passengers on both occasions were Americans. Of course in the summer—though it may be questioned whether that is, so decidedly as most people suppose, the best season for travelling in the United States—I might not have found my countrymen so conspicuous by their absence. And yet there is no part of the world which Englishmen ought to find so instructive and interesting. What is there in the world more worthy of investigation than the existing condition of things, and the events that are now taking place, upon this great continent, which contains within itself everything that is necessary for the well-being of man, which is indeed a world in itself, and which stands in the same relation towards the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that this little island does towards the Irish and North seas; and which, whatever else may befall, will at all events be thoroughly Anglo-Saxon?

Wherever one went in the South, one heard instances of the hardships, the deadliness, and the evils of the late war. Of the family of which I saw most at Richmond, the three sons had been sent to the army. Of these three one was killed, and another maimed for life. These were men who were no longer young, and many a day in their long marches, and when before the enemy, their commissariat having been utterly exhausted, they had had nothing to eat but a few handfuls of horse corn. There were regiments that did not bring home one fourth of the number with which they originally went out; the rest having died of disease, or fallen in battle. In the family of which I saw most at Charleston there were two sons, the eldest only eighteen years of age. They both enlisted in Hampton’s cavalry, for all above the age of sixteen had to go. And so again at New Orleans the gentleman to whom I was especially consigned, and who had held the commission of colonel in the Confederate army, and had been a rich merchant of the place, told me that he and his whole regiment were frequently without shoes, and that on one occasion he went barefooted for six weeks continuously.